Interview: Tom Preston-Werner Talks About GitHub's Past and Future

November 7, 2012

By Developer.com Staff

InfoWorld has published a lengthy interview with GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner. Highlights from Preston-Werner's comments include the following:

"I think the branching and the merging was the killer feature of Git in the beginning, and now GitHub is the killer feature of Git. I say that because people don't work alone anymore. All the easy problems have been solved. What remains are the hard problems, and in order to solve those hard problems we have to work together."

"One of the big reasons that we took the investment from Andreessen Horowitz is its belief in software as the future of the world. You've probably seen Marc Andreessen's article, 'Why software is eating the world.' That was really big for us. We're a company that allows software to be written more efficiently with greater developer happiness. And they believe that so much, and we believe our side so much, that you look and you say: What if we were to combine our forces, where we're building the software that's going to allow software to eat the world even more voraciously, more quickly, by being able to put more resources into things?"

"The way we've built this company is very much like open source itself, in that in the open source world people work on the things they find most interesting because nobody's forcing them to do so. What we try to do is hire the kind of people who are going to act in the same way. We hire them to work on something they're interested in, then help them to work on those interests without having a management structure that is sitting above them forcing them to get work done, otherwise they're on the chopping block."

"In the future, things other than just writing code are going to be hard, all the easy problems will have been solved, and if we can apply the things that we know about development to other disciplines, then we can change the world in even bigger ways."